I know it's been pointed out in numerous other hosts, but the body really can survive long-term on less than 2000 calories a day, and in the short-term can certainly burn far less than 2000 calories a day. Part of it is genetic, and part of it is environmental.
Some people natually have a low basal metabolic rate, meaning that if they sat on their ass all day, occassionally shifting positions to avoid bedsores or to go to the bathroom, they'd probably burn 1000-1500 calories a day, regardless of caloric intake. These people get fat very easily.
Now even your "average" person with a basal metabolic rate sufficient to burn 2000 calories while sitting on their ass can induce a lower BMR by starving themselves. The body goes into a protective mode, and lowers the BMR. In addition, the body, either through hormones or low blood sugar/fat levels, induces a state of laziness whereby the person moves sluggishly, conserving a maximum of energy.
If you can't get your head around this concept, try the following experiment. Drink just 16-24 ounces of water, once a day, and eat foods low in water content. Your body will quickly (couple days, tops) adapt to this water "starvation" diet, and you will both sweat and urinate less often. You may be able to go a day or two at a time without peeing, though it well start to smell.
Also, watch your weight. You should begin to gain a few pounds. You're taking in less weight of water, and you're gaining weight. That's because your body is storing the water.
Now, once your body gets to its maximum waterlogged weight, start drinking like mad. Not all at once, either. Drink 8-16 ounces of water, 8-16 times a day. Aim for about a gallon of water (twice the recommended 8 8-oz glasses a day).
In the first day or two, you'll probably lose about 3-4 pounds. How can that be? 3-4 pounds of fat is 10,000-15,000 calories. You couldn't burn that much in a marathon! 3-4 pounds of carbs or protein is still a good 5,000-7,000 calories. Assuming you're still eating 2,000-3,000 calories a day like normal, you'd have to burn 7,000-10,000 calories. So how'd you lose 3-4 pounds in a day or two, when you were eating your normal food intake and drinking several pounds of water? You just pissed and sweated it all away. You pissed and sweated half a gallon more water than you were drinking!
You body can store and conserve that which is scarce, and gets rid of what it doesn't need when it's plentiful (the extra water stretches tissue and adds weight, so in general it's not a good idea to store a lot of it if it's plentiful. Luckily, this isn't a conscious decision, mother nature figured this one out millions of years ago).
If your body can learn how to run on less than half of the water it normally uses, how far of a stretch is it to think that it can conserve calories, even to the point of using fewer calories than your already low-calorie diet is providing?
Now don't get me wrong. There is a limit. For some people, because of genetics, they can't get below 1800 or 1500 calories, even when eating only 600-1000 cals a day. IANANutritionist, so I don't know the exact number, but I suspect the average person, if not overly active (i.e. you're not a construction worker, you're a desk clerk) could get their calorie burning rate down to in the 1000-1400 range. Meaning some would lose weight on 1200 cals/day, and some could gain (though certainly not more than a pound every couple weeks; the rest would be water weight, because you're probably making the mistake of drinking less while eating less. Drink more, and the water weight comes off as well).
And as has been mentioned, the body is highly adaptable. Meaning that, assuming you're taking multi-vitamins and getting enough fiber, amino acids, and omega 3's and 6's, you're body would adjust to the low-calorie diet, and would no longer consider it starvation level. Then your body would stop trying to store fat, and your BMR would rise again (though not as high as before the low-cal diet), and you would start to lose weight. But it would probably take a few weeks.
The article at spacedaily.com did not mention if the substance maintained its "superhard" form after the pressure was released. I got the impression that it was hard while under pressure, but would revert (slowly, quickly?) after the pressure is released.
Did the Science article shed any light on this? Does it maintain its hardness? If not, what's the decay rate? Is it directly tied to the release of pressure, etc.?
Ah yes, but with salt, you need a very large concentration of salt. Your blood might be able to handle that much salt, but osmosis dictates that one of two things will happen to all the cells in your body: they will export water and shrivel up and die, or they will absorb the salt, which contains lots of ions, + and -, which will royally screw with your internal chemistry, and probably kill you.
Whatever is in the squirrels (or the lizards, where did they come from?) has to be either much more effective than salt, to keep the concentration low, or it has to be much less reactive (non-ionized perhaps, like sugar or alcohol) than salt.
That's just an over-simplification of the fact that all "everyday" interactions are controlled by photons. When I type, the electrons in the atoms on the surface of my skin push against the electrons in the atoms on the surface of the keys, and this interaction, being electrostatic in nature (with a hint of the exclusion principle thrown in for fun), is controlled by photons. To say that the information is carried in photons is like saying the information in a book is carried by photons. The information on a hard drive is carried by photons. Braille information is carried by photons.
Get the point. It's useless to speak of information being carried by photons in a passive manner. Now, your television signal being carried on radio waves... There's an active example.
But in computer chips, the information is carried by the electrons. Sorry, you lose this round.
What, the earth can be a source of gravity (or the blocking of an external pressure), and a heavy mass can't be?
If the earth blocks.0000001% (or another sillily small percentage) of the "gravitons" passing through it, you would have a net force pushing you down to the earth. If a heavy lead ball blocked 0.00000000000001% of the gravitons passing through it, you would get a net push to the side (or whatever direction the ball is from the test mass)
It works. The only thing that makes it tricky is that the gravitons, assumed to have momentum (because they impart momentum) and therefore energy, must be absorbed by atoms (all particles, really), without a net increase in the energy of said particles. They can't be scattered, because the scattered gravitons would cancel the effect of the original gravitons. But that's an entirely different complaint.
With the photon interaction of electric particles, the photon is a virtual particle with a low enough energy to exist long enough to reach the other particle. But at least the distances are finite. Try to interact an electron with another at a distance of a lightyear, and the energy of any virtual photons to cover that distance is just about zero. Of course, what's the electric force between two electrons at a light-year? Well, about zero.
However, with the external pressure point of view of gravity, these virtual particles are coming from infinity, or from the background radiation leftover from the big bang, if you prefer. Essentially, they are coming from the beginning of time and space. To travel billions of light years, they would have to have phenomenally low energy (below or at most equal to the lowest measurable quantity of energy, most likely), and this would mean that there would have to be buttloads of them (I'm guessing trillions per cubic nanometer, for starters).
Could you please elaborate on how the DMCA makes a DMCAbot honeypot illegal? I'm not trying to be a troll, I honestly want to know what other evil clauses are in the DMCA (either I haven't heard of this clause yet, or it's a new twist on the DMCA I hadn't heard yet).
Also, define "misrepresenting yourself". If I am a commercial (or non-commercial) site, and I have a bunch of files available for download that have legitimate purposes, but happen to be named in ways that would fool a braindead DMCAbot, how is that misrepresentation?
Are you criminal law or civil? If civil, is your client being sued because he hit someone in the head with a baseball bat, or because he left his baseball bat on his porch and it was used by someone else to hit someone in the head. If he hit the person in the head, are you just trying to get the facts presented and minimize the sentence, or are you trying to convince the jury that the victim was prokoving your client when he was hit in the back of the head with the baseball bat....
Yes, there are times when lawyers are needed. And at those times, being a lawyer can be a noble profession.
Unfortunately, most people have the impression that lawyers don't present the evidence and the relevant laws upon which a reasonable verdict should be made (which is what they should be doing). People get the impression that lawyers lie about, omit, and otherwise twist both the evidence and the relevant law, putting things clearly out of context in a way noticeable to other lawyers and thus fooling the uneducated jury.
A good recent example was the lawyer who argued that oversized tires on a speeding car could have fooled the computer that measures the cars speed, so that the computer's measure of 114 MPH was actually supposed to be 60 MPH. Hence, the defendant was going about 2.5 times the speed limit, not 4.5 times the limit.
The lawyer was obviously lying. Oh, you could say that he didn't know for sure that what he was saying was false... Oh, come on! The tires would literally have had to be double sized for that logic to hold up. Even assuming that the car's standard tires were a 23" diameter (it was Pontiac, I believe, so more likely 24"-26" standard), then tires would have had to be on the order of 50" in diameter. Hell, even most over-sized mud tires are only in the 36"-44" range... On a truck... Who the hell puts 50" tires on a Pontiac car (firebird or grand prix).
Luckily, the jury didn't buy it. Only because the example is just simple enough that, even if there hadn't been a rebutting "expert" witness, people could hopefully figure this one out. But make the example a little more complicated, perhaps involving voodoo technology (like wi-fi or encryption technology), and the jury has to take the lawyers' (and by extension, their witnesses') word for it.
Of course, the entire blame can't lie with the lawyer. People are too easily excited, and the lawyers play as much or more on their emotions as they do on their twisted versions of the facts.
Yeah, I feel sorry for the old lady who burned her crotch with hot coffee. But I'm sorry, 2 million (or was it 7 mil) is just outrageous. And yes, for those who want to point out that it was more than just the fact that the coffee was hot, I do understand a little more of the background.
I don't have the exact numbers, but basically, coffee is cooked at ~190 F, but should be served at ~165 F or cooler. Coffee shops cook their coffee, then let it cool. McDonald's served it at the full ~190 F.
But that's just the smoke and mirrors portion of the lawsuit. People think that the lady won the suit because she was stupid and McDonald's didn't warn her (i.e. McDonlad's didn't save her from her stupidity). And regardless of what McD's did or didn't do about the temperature thing, people are right. McD's lost the lawsuit because they didn't protect the lady from her own stupidity.
This is the employee who works for the international conglomo-retail store who makes just above minimum wage, but has insurance premiums so high he can't afford to go to the doctor when he's sick.
This is Jane, who is happier than Dan, because she watched the the same movie at the movie theatre, and had a much better "theatrical experience", whereas Dan had to watch the movie on his 17" monitor, with his 12 watt stereo speakers and his pathetic 6.5" subwoofer.
Granted, there is that elite 0.2% of movie enthusiasts that have the 60" HDTV, 600 watt 6-point surround sound stereo with 1000 watt 14" subwoofer, so they might not miss the movie theatre. But most people I know still like going to the theaters... Well, let me rephrase that. They like watching movies in a theater. They don't like paying theater prices. If movie theatres are going to charge $10 for a movie, $5 for a large popcorn ($4.50 for a small), $4 for a large soda($3.25 for small), and $3 for a 4-piece Reeces's peanut butter cup ($2.75 for a 3-piece, $2.50 for a two-piece), and if movie studios are going to price DVDs at $25, $20, or even $15, and if record labels are going to price CDs at $20, or even $15, then they deserve what's coming their way...
Honestly people, it's not like the movie business is going out of business. Who are you people who actually are wasting valuable energy supporting the RI/MPAA? Your energy could be better spent in repealing the DMCA. If not, if could at least be better spent organizing the 200 CDs in your collectiong that you paid full price (i.e. $20) for and not arguing on behalf of an industry that considers itself above the law, indeed above the Constitution.
Me? Supporting piracy, I must be a pirate myself, you say? I put in my time and money to supporting the RIAA. I've got over 250 CDs, maybe eight of them bough used, the rest at store price (usually WalMart or Best Buy, I won't pay mall prices). I've given them my $4000, and I'm through with them. $10 CDs I can handle, but for a supposedly failing industry to think that charging $20 ($19.99 in all fairness) for a CD (when it's cheaper to produce a CD now than it was 15 years ago when they cost $12) is going to dissuade people from moving to piracy, they've got another thing coming.
The first record label or movie studio to go out of business is going to remind the other studios about horse-drawn carriages, gas-powered lamps, and the telegraph.
People still travel in four-wheeled vehicles they own, but you don't see any multi-billion dollar horse-drawn carriage companies. People still need light when it's dark, but you don't see multi-billion dollar gas-powered lamp companies. People still communicate with each other electronically in verbal and textual form across neighborhoods, cities, states, countries, and indeed continents, but you don't see any multi-billion dollar telegraph companies (I'm not as sure about this one).
Let's envision a world where people use electricity for "legal" purposes like watching television or running the air conditioner, but light is still provided by gas. Some "cracker" (probably a 15-year-old living in Europe) comes up with the electric powered light-bulb.
Suddenly the gas company and the gas-powered lamp multi-national corporations start breaking into people's homes without warrants to catch light-pirates. They force through a Congressional bill that would require TV and AC manufacturers to design their devices to handle specially modulated power signals. Wall outlets and power-distribution switches are designed to detect non-conforming devices, and to send electrical discharges that destroy non-licensed technology, presumable the pirate "light bulbs".
No provision is made for the GLAA (Gas-powered Lamp Association of America) to pay customers for TVs or ACs damaged accidentally.
The law is amended to prevent the GLAA from actually damaging equipment. Instead, they monitor your electricity usage, look f
Look, it's probably already been covered, but here goes...
You don't aim the solar sail directly at the sun. You aim it so that the sun's light is reflected back into your orbital path, and you are accelerated on your orbital path. Increased orbital speed means increased orbital energy, which will push you into a higher orbit.
The highly elliptical orbit is avoided as long as the thrust is constant. As your sail "peaks out" and would want to start falling back in (on its ellipse), you continue to add energy, which means that you continue to spiral out away from the sun.
Now, you can't actually aim your thrust perpendicular to the line from your sail to the sun. You have to aim it sort of diagonally, with a component of thrust pushing you away from the sun and a component accelerating your orbital velocity. But this is a good thing, since it's actually more efficient. You could use 100% of your thrust to increase your orbital velocity. Or, using a little trig, you could use 50% of your thrust to increase your orbital velocity, and 86.6% of your thrust to push away from the sun.
The return trip is fairly similar. You aim the sun's reflected light forward into your orbital path, which robs your sail of energy, and you start to fall/spiral inward. Of course, by the time you're out at Pluto's orbit, even if you could completely stop your orbital velocity, and just fall straight into the sun (with your sail perpendicular to the sun to prevent outward acceleration), it would take a long, long time to free-fall back to earth's orbit. So the return trip is virtually guaranteed to take longer than the outbound trip. But that's where a solar-powered ion-engine would come in handy. Use the solar sail to go out, conserving propellant and saving mass, then use the solar sail to induce a free-fall or near free-fall and use the ion-engine to get back in a reasonable timeframe.
<sarcasm>Yeah, he probably doesn't know shit</sarcasm>
The proof is in the pudding. This is basic physics that even an undergraduate who's on the ball should be able to figure out. If he really is such an accomplished physicist, then he's also an idiot. Let's go through a few examples:
With a few exceptions, reflection is the absorption and re-emission of photons (TIR being one. Also, there are fancy materials I read about on slashdot that use microscopic bubbles that preclude light of certain wavelengths, allowing perfect reflection of certain wavelengths). Gold argues that a blackbody that absorbs a photon receives a push of momentum.
So, what, re-emitting that photon causes an opposite momentum kick that cancels the first momentum kick? A far-fetched claim, to be sure, but the only one that preserves any semblance of a mathematical foundation. Or does it... It means that if you played backwards a movie of the absorption/re-emission, you would see the photon being absorbed, and the solar sail accelerating toward the sun, then the photon being re-emitted, and the solar sail being accelerated away from the sun. Which is of course the exact opposite of what happens when the movie is played forwards, and hence a violation of the principle that at the quantum level, events have no preferred direction in time. Well, I suppose quantum mechanics could be wrong...
Next, let's address his argument about equilibrium. Quoth: Would it be better to place a black sheet there instead of a mirror-faced one? Unlike the mirror, this could absorb energy and the momentum associated with that. But it would do this only from the moment of its exposure until it reached thermal equilibrium with the available radiation. Then energy absorption would cease, and with that the delivery of momentum to the sheet would also cease. For any lightweight sheet, this time would be only seconds.
Hmm, as I recall, the solar sail was to be extremely thin, right? So the blackbody radiation that it would emit would be in both directions, imparting no net acceleration or deceleration. Yet energy would continue to flow from the direction of the sun. Even if we accepted Gold's bogus claim that only absorbed (non-reflected) light imparts momentum, clearly there is still energy pouring in from only one direction, even at "thermal equilibrium". Another way to look at it is that the side that is exposed to space is not in thermal equilibrium, and continues to emit blackbody radiation into space. Sorry Gold, no twinkie.
As to his point that the "temperature" of the reflected light doesn't drop, that's crap. If he's going to assign a temperature to the incoming light, then he can't compare the "temperature" of the refelcted light in an accelerating frame.
Quoth: We can determine the incoming temperature of the radiation by measuring the temperature an absorbing (black) body would reach when exposed to the radiation being sent to the mirror, and the temperature a black body would reach exposed to the outgoing radiation from the mirror, both measurements carried out in common motion with the mirror.
These are two completely different reference frames. When a single photon is reflected off the solar sail, the solar sail is ever-so-slightly accelerated. That means the reference frame he chose for the reflected light is not the same as the reference frame for the incoming light. The photon is ever-so-slightly red-shifted in the frame of reference that the solar sail was in before the photon struck it; hence, there actually is a drop in its "temperature".
This will change eventually, or at least it should. When people hire contractors to come in and fix their house, they don't always go for the lowest bidder who will finish faster.
If you want your walls painted, do you hire the guy who costs $500 and takes two days, or the guy who costs $300 and takes one day.
The first guy guarantees that he will use a coat of primer, two coats of paint, and that he will fix any defects, though there probably will be very few if any.
The second guy guarantees that there will be paint on the wall.
Yeah, there's cheap bastards out there that will go with the second guy, but most people would go for the first one.
But in this society, people don't care about the quality of technology. They don't want two coats of paint; they don't want the right color and right finish; they don't even care if there's a coat of primer. They just want paint on the wall. That's one of the many, many reasons that the dot-coms failed. And at some point, people are going to have to start caring. I hope, anyway.
In weblogs, letters, personal emails, etc., it is quite common to ignore the conventions of punctuation, captialization, and even spelling. And yes, sometimes people make mistakes. Sorry, but no points are awarded for your critique!
However, when one uses "loose" in place of "lose", it is usually quite obvious that the person actually believes this to be the correct spelling. So the poster above you still had a valid point!
There is a difference between the occasional misspelling or grammar mistake, and the constant misspelling of lose/loose.
That is, it's one thing if I accidentally misspelled "lose" as "loose" in one instance, if I were to spell it correctly 95% of the time. It's quite another thing to be a moron who thinks that when he has lost something, he should try harder not to loose something else.
For that matter, most engineers think that "setup" is a verb. The fact that you can set something up implies the verb's separability, and hence the requirement for a space between "set" and "up". This would be another example where, regardless of the conventions that are or are not being followed, you can still tell if someone clearly does not know how something should be written.
I read a story in an Asimov magazine about 8-10 years ago that addressed the energy issue. While somewhat farfetched at the time, I've seen other serious proposals in recent years.
It basically consists of a huge tower or two built in the Gulf of Mexico (perhaps in Texas and Mississippi, or wherever). The towers suck in hot moist air at the bottom, and the air rises. As it rises, the air cools, and moisture condenses, releasing heat/engergy. The condensed warm water is extracted, and cold dry air exits the top of the towers, at about 25,000-30,000 feet. The guy ran some basic figures in his article, and found that a tower could change the air over several hundred square miles from 90 degrees at 90% humidity to 85 degrees at 85% humidity during the late summer months. This would reduce the energy available in front of incoming hurricanes, weakening them just before landfall. And because of the pressure and humidity gradients that would be created, it would actually help, not hinder energy dissipation from the warm Gulf waters.
Of course, the costs of the project would be stupendous, and even factoring in the savings in hurricane damages, it would take decades to pay for itself.
Walmart offered CDs below cost? I can't remember when the last time was that I bought new hit CDs for under a buck at WalMart. Let me think... No, I think I always pay more than 10 or 12 bucks for the new stuff, and at least eight for the old stuff.... No, I can't think of a time in the last couple years I was able to buy something on the top 100 list for under a buck.
Honestly, below cost? You fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. When they say below cost, they mean below the manufacturing cost (reasonable), shipping cost (reasonable), the 10 cent cut the artist gets (actually lower than it should be), the $1.50 they spend getting marketting clients drunk and laid so they can get their business, the $1.00 that goes to the top executives pocketbook, the $2.00 that goes to the agent, the $3.00 in promotional/advertising fees that they expense, etc. etc. You put enough crooked executives and accountants in a smoke-filled room, and they'll find a way to justify the "cost" of a CD as $5-$10, if not more.
So when they said that WalMart and other discount chains offer CDs "below cost", what they meant to say was that they offer them below Cartel prices.
Put another way, think about sodas. There are soft drink brands out there that sell for 5-6 cents a can in bulk, and 20 cents for individual sale. And they stay in business. Yet if Coca-cola or Pepsi were to quote their "costs" for a can of soda, you can bet it's north of 10 cents a can. Where's that extra 6-8 cents worth of "cost"? It ain't the cost of the soda or the packaging, that's for sure.
Whether it's soda or music, that extra "cost" is name-brand markup, advertising, not to mention overpaid executives. So what if their market's being eroded away. I don't consider name brand recognition/loyalty a "cost", so screw them!
No, no, no, no, no! We *can* control it. We *can* build fault tolerant systems. We *can* take our time to ensure that our application will only respond to valid input/requests/etc...
What happened to the idea of a program having a well defined set of inputs and only causing it to respond to those inputs? And if something goes wrong, where are people getting off trying to blame it on the user be it a person or another program using that well defined interface? Argh.
Actually, I work in support for a software company, and we had a customer report a problem with our software. We eventually tracked it down to a hard disk problem that was returning bad data. The customer actually had the nerve to say that it was our problem, and that if we couldn't handle the bad data, then we were poor programmers.
Now tell me, if the hard drive is going bad and intermittently returns bad data, including the the executable code itself, how are you supposed to deal with that?!? Do you write the code in multiply redundant code blocks, and tweak the machine code so that if the starting offset is set to a random location, including in the middle of a valid instruction, that your code can still recover?
Building code that can respond to all valid inputs with valid outputs, AND can respond to any and all invalid inputs with appropriate errors and or nothing (i.e. ignore the bad input), is one thing. Building a piece of software that can run, even in the presense of faulty hardware, is quite another.
I mean, what the hell do customers want?!? Is my company's software supposed to patch any and all seciruty holes in the OS as well? Fix their broken hardware, divine the corrupted data coming in from peripherals and disk drives? How about foretell the stock market for the next decade, and give them the phone numbers of hot chicks that will do them for free?
Plumbers aren't liable if someone comes around after they have installed central heating and heats up the joints (or drills a hole, etc) to create a leak, so why should software engineers or companies be liable when someone tries to break the code?
I beg to differ. A more fair analogy is if you hired a security firm to install a security system, and then you later found out that the cameras couldn't see criminals wearing green. Suddenly, once this is figured out, people in kermit the frog costumes start breaking in and stealing your stuff, and the cameras never saw a thing.
Far-fetched and silly example, yes. But it underscores the difference between your analogy and the real situation. If IIS or Internet Explorer has a hole that allows a remote root attack on your system, comparing it to a plumber's job is a very bad analogy.
Now, if you compared it to a plumber that decided to run all the pipes along the outside of the building to save money, instead of running them underground and in the walls, and then a "criminal" came along, tapped into the outside line, and fed poison into your drinking supply, then that plumber should be liable. As long as "reasonable" measures were taken to prevent that, then there's no liability (i.e. internal plumbing, and a criminal got hired as a janitor, and got access to the plumbing in the basement, then tapped into the system, then that's not the plumber's problem...)
I think it's a very straightforward thing to solve. The teacher doesn't need to be an expert on calculators, they just need to know what they are trying to teach. In pre-algebra and earlier classes, the bulk of what you're trying to teach is numerical calculation, so for the most part, you don't allow calculators. When a test comes along that is based on a concept more than anything else (like, can they solve word problems), then you allow a simple calculator.
In the more advanced classes, like algebra and up, you can usually allow at least a basic scientific calculator on all your tests, except for those few rare tests when you expect a student to know and apply the formula for something basic like exponents (3^5 isn't too difficult to expect an algebra student to do, but is quite trivial on a calculator).
As you get up into the realm of calculus, then at first a scientific calculator with no built-in calculus tools (diff. and integrals, numeric or symbolic) will suffice. Over time you can phase in graphing calculators/PDAs. You first test them on the basics with the sci calculator, so that they have to apply the principle. Once they've demonstrated they can apply the principle, then a subsequent test on the same subject matter, with a few additions and being more advanced, could allow a graphing calculator. When the next basic concept is taught, it's back to the scientific calculator.
It's quite simple. I realize that this cookie cutter approach doesn't fit everything. But having grown up in the dawn of graphing calculators, I came to depend more on my ability to be able to solve things on my own, to apply what I've learned. When I know it like the back of my hand, then I don't feel guilty using the calculator, because it's become a tool.
I guess this could get into a philosophical debate over whether we want our kids (or even our college students) just using tools that they never bothered to study or understand. I personally feel that a student shouldn't be allowed to use a tool (in math or sciense at least) unless they have studied its origins and understand WHY it works, not just that it works. And most of the time, understanding why it works is hands-on, meaning they have to do it themselves, not let a calculator solve it for them. Understanding why a tool works also helps when a problem comes along that doesn't quite fit the tool. If you understand the tools foundation, you can modify it to fit the problem, and move on. If you don't understand the tool, then you start looking for another tool...
You know, I had to read that twice to see the double/triple meanings of the metaphors you used. Very interesting.
Are these your own thoughts, or are you part of or subscribe to an organization that has more information? Do you have a website that I can visit?
I'm not trying to be a troll or anything. I just am torn between defending capitalism and the USA and other developed countries, and the need for humanity which sometimes seems to fly right in the face of the ideals this country functions on today.
So let me see if I have this straight. The B2C market would convert to pay-per-play(live), meaning the performers would get paid for actual work/performance, whereas the B2B market would continue with the make-money-sitting-on-my-ass method.
I'd say that's fair. The B2C market is roughly a few-to-many market, so pay-per-play is viable, whereas the B2B market (in this case, composers to performers) is a few-to-few market, and composing takes a hell of a lot longer than performing, so those two factors combined justify keeping the make-money-sitting-on-my-ass system for composers.
Actually, one way to help prevent this and educate the public is to find the CDs that "demonstrate" the lower quality of "Redbook" CDs, and do a manual resampling of the data to from the "super" layer to CD quality. If you can produce a resampling at CD quality that is significantly better than the version shipped on the Redbook layer, and if it's hardly distinguishable from the "super" layer, then you've got ammo to go public with your conspiracy theory. The media would love something like that.
Of course, this is assuming that the "super" layer can be ripped in full digital quality, i.e. that there is no DRM or weak DRM.
Another thing: Based on my understanding of the capabilities of the human ear, any improvement in quality over "CD quality" couldn't be discerned anyways, so what is the advantage of this proposed "improved" format?
Actually, it depends on the type of sounds. High frequency sounds (above 5-10 kHz), common for certain types of instruments or sounds effects, get distorted and sound somewhat flat, especially as they approach the limit of human hearing (16-20 kHz, depending on the person).
Yeah, you're not going to get more incredible bass with high sampling rates. And yeah, going from 16-bit to 24-bit is only going to matter for very quiet sounds on very high-fidelity/low noise equipment. But there are the rare few people who spend hundreds of dollars on the tweeters, not the subwoofers, and who demand the highest quiality "treble". CDs don't deliver it.
Re:I Cancelled My Earthlink Account
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Disconnecting
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· Score: 5, Interesting
3. Can't get them to stop billing you.. call your credit card company and have them stop accepting the charges..
Oh, if only it were that easy. Allow me to relate a horrow story of a friend of mine that he had with MSN. After a few months of service, he decided to cancel and move on to someone else's service.
He went to their webpage, which actually had a cancellation procedure (whatever happened to those days? I smell a conspiracy!). However, after he entered his info and tried to cancel the service (by clicking the button on the webpage), the browser just hung, until the page timed out. He tried several times, but he could never get a cancellation confirmation page to load.
So, he called customer service and tried to cancel through them. They were happy to take his information, waste his time, and then inform him that they were experiencing computer problems, and they could not cancel his service at that time.
So, he called a few days later, and same story. He just kind of let it go, because it was just $20 a month, no big deal, right? So he calls customer service a couple months later, and their computers have since been up and running, but are now broken again. Yeah, a likely story...
So my friend calls Discover, and tells him that he wants to stop accepting charges from MSN. Discover informs him that these charges are recurring and must be cancelled with MSN, Discover cannot decline them.
In the end, my friend was forced to pay off his Discover card and then cancel it. Welcome to Hell, my friends, weclome to Hell...
So you're saying that to qualify as having a story, it has to be non-linear? In other words, it has to be a full simulation where you can do anything you want?
That's like saying the only books that have a story are "choose your own adventure" books.
Granted, the plot is linear, but there is a plot. There's conversations, there's deception, betrayal, there are clues to pick up (although you don't need the clues if your clever or trigger happy enough), there's a whole atmosphere created (i.e. art, another thing protected under the first amendment).
I'll admit, that given the advances in processor speed and AI engines (well, okay, really big scripts usually, that are non-linear enough to not look like scripts), a much more interactive game would be possible today compared to four years ago. But don't let technology get in the way.
If you want to get picky, then let's go back to old Sierra and LucasArts games. My personal favorite? Monkey Island (the first one, but I guess they all would work). That game is extremely non-linear in the short-term scale, though granted the overall plot of the game is fairly linear. But the conversations, the jokes, the romance, the jokes, the characters, the artwork, the jokes, the music, the rubber tree, the jokes... That's clearly free speech, even this judge should be able to see that, even if he does have his head up his... well, I'll refrain from exercising my right to free speech...
There are protected forms of free speech that add far less to the common good, far less to the creativity and knowledge of mankind, that are far more obscene and repulsive, disaffecting the hearts of men and women; compared to games like Monkey Island that postively shaped thousands of young lives in the 80's, adding to creativity, creating a constuctive skillset of problem solving and creating friendships, etc. Don't let a lack of non-linearity justify the claim that a game does not contain a story.
Escpecially games like Half-Life where you're not just going around and shooting things and blowing them up. There's actually a plot. There are clues to follow, people to rescue, a mystery to solve. There are cinematic sequences built straight into the game, using the game engine. It actually makes the game much more interesting, as you immerse yourself into a virtual interactive movie, moving from gameplay straight into cinematic sequences, without cuts in the action, so it all flows together like one glorious whole (Rimmer, you really are one glorious hole!). There's deception, betrayal, etc.
And what about Alice. Yeah, there's comical violence. But it's an artistic expression of a classic novel (and several movies and cartoon adaptations). And there's even a plot to it. Plot, and artistic adapation. Free speech? How much plainer does it get?
I bet the judge played games like Quake Arena, Redneck Rampage, Carmageddon, and Julie's Porn Shack (okay, I made that last one up). I mean, yeah, pick a game that has little or no plot, just gratuitous violence and/or sex, and you might get a bad impression. But you can't judge the whole of video games on a few bad (but fun) apples! And once you admit that at least a good percentage of video games are easy, if not obvious and essential, to classify as protected speech, then what separates them from the other games? A judge's personal opinion? Whoo-hoo, another victory for freedom!!
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I know it's been pointed out in numerous other hosts, but the body really can survive long-term on less than 2000 calories a day, and in the short-term can certainly burn far less than 2000 calories a day. Part of it is genetic, and part of it is environmental.
Some people natually have a low basal metabolic rate, meaning that if they sat on their ass all day, occassionally shifting positions to avoid bedsores or to go to the bathroom, they'd probably burn 1000-1500 calories a day, regardless of caloric intake. These people get fat very easily.
Now even your "average" person with a basal metabolic rate sufficient to burn 2000 calories while sitting on their ass can induce a lower BMR by starving themselves. The body goes into a protective mode, and lowers the BMR. In addition, the body, either through hormones or low blood sugar/fat levels, induces a state of laziness whereby the person moves sluggishly, conserving a maximum of energy.
If you can't get your head around this concept, try the following experiment. Drink just 16-24 ounces of water, once a day, and eat foods low in water content. Your body will quickly (couple days, tops) adapt to this water "starvation" diet, and you will both sweat and urinate less often. You may be able to go a day or two at a time without peeing, though it well start to smell.
Also, watch your weight. You should begin to gain a few pounds. You're taking in less weight of water, and you're gaining weight. That's because your body is storing the water.
Now, once your body gets to its maximum waterlogged weight, start drinking like mad. Not all at once, either. Drink 8-16 ounces of water, 8-16 times a day. Aim for about a gallon of water (twice the recommended 8 8-oz glasses a day).
In the first day or two, you'll probably lose about 3-4 pounds. How can that be? 3-4 pounds of fat is 10,000-15,000 calories. You couldn't burn that much in a marathon! 3-4 pounds of carbs or protein is still a good 5,000-7,000 calories. Assuming you're still eating 2,000-3,000 calories a day like normal, you'd have to burn 7,000-10,000 calories. So how'd you lose 3-4 pounds in a day or two, when you were eating your normal food intake and drinking several pounds of water? You just pissed and sweated it all away. You pissed and sweated half a gallon more water than you were drinking!
You body can store and conserve that which is scarce, and gets rid of what it doesn't need when it's plentiful (the extra water stretches tissue and adds weight, so in general it's not a good idea to store a lot of it if it's plentiful. Luckily, this isn't a conscious decision, mother nature figured this one out millions of years ago).
If your body can learn how to run on less than half of the water it normally uses, how far of a stretch is it to think that it can conserve calories, even to the point of using fewer calories than your already low-calorie diet is providing?
Now don't get me wrong. There is a limit. For some people, because of genetics, they can't get below 1800 or 1500 calories, even when eating only 600-1000 cals a day. IANANutritionist, so I don't know the exact number, but I suspect the average person, if not overly active (i.e. you're not a construction worker, you're a desk clerk) could get their calorie burning rate down to in the 1000-1400 range. Meaning some would lose weight on 1200 cals/day, and some could gain (though certainly not more than a pound every couple weeks; the rest would be water weight, because you're probably making the mistake of drinking less while eating less. Drink more, and the water weight comes off as well).
And as has been mentioned, the body is highly adaptable. Meaning that, assuming you're taking multi-vitamins and getting enough fiber, amino acids, and omega 3's and 6's, you're body would adjust to the low-calorie diet, and would no longer consider it starvation level. Then your body would stop trying to store fat, and your BMR would rise again (though not as high as before the low-cal diet), and you would start to lose weight. But it would probably take a few weeks.
The article at spacedaily.com did not mention if the substance maintained its "superhard" form after the pressure was released. I got the impression that it was hard while under pressure, but would revert (slowly, quickly?) after the pressure is released.
Did the Science article shed any light on this? Does it maintain its hardness? If not, what's the decay rate? Is it directly tied to the release of pressure, etc.?
Ah yes, but with salt, you need a very large concentration of salt. Your blood might be able to handle that much salt, but osmosis dictates that one of two things will happen to all the cells in your body: they will export water and shrivel up and die, or they will absorb the salt, which contains lots of ions, + and -, which will royally screw with your internal chemistry, and probably kill you.
Whatever is in the squirrels (or the lizards, where did they come from?) has to be either much more effective than salt, to keep the concentration low, or it has to be much less reactive (non-ionized perhaps, like sugar or alcohol) than salt.
That's just an over-simplification of the fact that all "everyday" interactions are controlled by photons. When I type, the electrons in the atoms on the surface of my skin push against the electrons in the atoms on the surface of the keys, and this interaction, being electrostatic in nature (with a hint of the exclusion principle thrown in for fun), is controlled by photons. To say that the information is carried in photons is like saying the information in a book is carried by photons. The information on a hard drive is carried by photons. Braille information is carried by photons.
Get the point. It's useless to speak of information being carried by photons in a passive manner. Now, your television signal being carried on radio waves... There's an active example.
But in computer chips, the information is carried by the electrons. Sorry, you lose this round.
Why the hell was this comment marked informative?
.0000001% (or another sillily small percentage) of the "gravitons" passing through it, you would have a net force pushing you down to the earth. If a heavy lead ball blocked 0.00000000000001% of the gravitons passing through it, you would get a net push to the side (or whatever direction the ball is from the test mass)
What, the earth can be a source of gravity (or the blocking of an external pressure), and a heavy mass can't be?
If the earth blocks
It works. The only thing that makes it tricky is that the gravitons, assumed to have momentum (because they impart momentum) and therefore energy, must be absorbed by atoms (all particles, really), without a net increase in the energy of said particles. They can't be scattered, because the scattered gravitons would cancel the effect of the original gravitons. But that's an entirely different complaint.
With the photon interaction of electric particles, the photon is a virtual particle with a low enough energy to exist long enough to reach the other particle. But at least the distances are finite. Try to interact an electron with another at a distance of a lightyear, and the energy of any virtual photons to cover that distance is just about zero. Of course, what's the electric force between two electrons at a light-year? Well, about zero.
However, with the external pressure point of view of gravity, these virtual particles are coming from infinity, or from the background radiation leftover from the big bang, if you prefer. Essentially, they are coming from the beginning of time and space. To travel billions of light years, they would have to have phenomenally low energy (below or at most equal to the lowest measurable quantity of energy, most likely), and this would mean that there would have to be buttloads of them (I'm guessing trillions per cubic nanometer, for starters).
Could you please elaborate on how the DMCA makes a DMCAbot honeypot illegal? I'm not trying to be a troll, I honestly want to know what other evil clauses are in the DMCA (either I haven't heard of this clause yet, or it's a new twist on the DMCA I hadn't heard yet).
Also, define "misrepresenting yourself". If I am a commercial (or non-commercial) site, and I have a bunch of files available for download that have legitimate purposes, but happen to be named in ways that would fool a braindead DMCAbot, how is that misrepresentation?
Are you criminal law or civil? If civil, is your client being sued because he hit someone in the head with a baseball bat, or because he left his baseball bat on his porch and it was used by someone else to hit someone in the head. If he hit the person in the head, are you just trying to get the facts presented and minimize the sentence, or are you trying to convince the jury that the victim was prokoving your client when he was hit in the back of the head with the baseball bat....
Yes, there are times when lawyers are needed. And at those times, being a lawyer can be a noble profession.
Unfortunately, most people have the impression that lawyers don't present the evidence and the relevant laws upon which a reasonable verdict should be made (which is what they should be doing). People get the impression that lawyers lie about, omit, and otherwise twist both the evidence and the relevant law, putting things clearly out of context in a way noticeable to other lawyers and thus fooling the uneducated jury.
A good recent example was the lawyer who argued that oversized tires on a speeding car could have fooled the computer that measures the cars speed, so that the computer's measure of 114 MPH was actually supposed to be 60 MPH. Hence, the defendant was going about 2.5 times the speed limit, not 4.5 times the limit.
The lawyer was obviously lying. Oh, you could say that he didn't know for sure that what he was saying was false... Oh, come on! The tires would literally have had to be double sized for that logic to hold up. Even assuming that the car's standard tires were a 23" diameter (it was Pontiac, I believe, so more likely 24"-26" standard), then tires would have had to be on the order of 50" in diameter. Hell, even most over-sized mud tires are only in the 36"-44" range... On a truck... Who the hell puts 50" tires on a Pontiac car (firebird or grand prix).
Luckily, the jury didn't buy it. Only because the example is just simple enough that, even if there hadn't been a rebutting "expert" witness, people could hopefully figure this one out. But make the example a little more complicated, perhaps involving voodoo technology (like wi-fi or encryption technology), and the jury has to take the lawyers' (and by extension, their witnesses') word for it.
Of course, the entire blame can't lie with the lawyer. People are too easily excited, and the lawyers play as much or more on their emotions as they do on their twisted versions of the facts.
Yeah, I feel sorry for the old lady who burned her crotch with hot coffee. But I'm sorry, 2 million (or was it 7 mil) is just outrageous. And yes, for those who want to point out that it was more than just the fact that the coffee was hot, I do understand a little more of the background.
I don't have the exact numbers, but basically, coffee is cooked at ~190 F, but should be served at ~165 F or cooler. Coffee shops cook their coffee, then let it cool. McDonald's served it at the full ~190 F.
But that's just the smoke and mirrors portion of the lawsuit. People think that the lady won the suit because she was stupid and McDonald's didn't warn her (i.e. McDonlad's didn't save her from her stupidity). And regardless of what McD's did or didn't do about the temperature thing, people are right. McD's lost the lawsuit because they didn't protect the lady from her own stupidity.
It's not like the RIAA can just go into people's homes and start busting open computers for pirated music.
Well, not yet anyway.
This is the employee who works for the international conglomo-retail store who makes just above minimum wage, but has insurance premiums so high he can't afford to go to the doctor when he's sick.
This is Jane, who is happier than Dan, because she watched the the same movie at the movie theatre, and had a much better "theatrical experience", whereas Dan had to watch the movie on his 17" monitor, with his 12 watt stereo speakers and his pathetic 6.5" subwoofer.
Granted, there is that elite 0.2% of movie enthusiasts that have the 60" HDTV, 600 watt 6-point surround sound stereo with 1000 watt 14" subwoofer, so they might not miss the movie theatre. But most people I know still like going to the theaters... Well, let me rephrase that. They like watching movies in a theater. They don't like paying theater prices. If movie theatres are going to charge $10 for a movie, $5 for a large popcorn ($4.50 for a small), $4 for a large soda($3.25 for small), and $3 for a 4-piece Reeces's peanut butter cup ($2.75 for a 3-piece, $2.50 for a two-piece), and if movie studios are going to price DVDs at $25, $20, or even $15, and if record labels are going to price CDs at $20, or even $15, then they deserve what's coming their way...
Honestly people, it's not like the movie business is going out of business. Who are you people who actually are wasting valuable energy supporting the RI/MPAA? Your energy could be better spent in repealing the DMCA. If not, if could at least be better spent organizing the 200 CDs in your collectiong that you paid full price (i.e. $20) for and not arguing on behalf of an industry that considers itself above the law, indeed above the Constitution.
Me? Supporting piracy, I must be a pirate myself, you say? I put in my time and money to supporting the RIAA. I've got over 250 CDs, maybe eight of them bough used, the rest at store price (usually WalMart or Best Buy, I won't pay mall prices). I've given them my $4000, and I'm through with them. $10 CDs I can handle, but for a supposedly failing industry to think that charging $20 ($19.99 in all fairness) for a CD (when it's cheaper to produce a CD now than it was 15 years ago when they cost $12) is going to dissuade people from moving to piracy, they've got another thing coming.
The first record label or movie studio to go out of business is going to remind the other studios about horse-drawn carriages, gas-powered lamps, and the telegraph.
People still travel in four-wheeled vehicles they own, but you don't see any multi-billion dollar horse-drawn carriage companies. People still need light when it's dark, but you don't see multi-billion dollar gas-powered lamp companies. People still communicate with each other electronically in verbal and textual form across neighborhoods, cities, states, countries, and indeed continents, but you don't see any multi-billion dollar telegraph companies (I'm not as sure about this one).
Let's envision a world where people use electricity for "legal" purposes like watching television or running the air conditioner, but light is still provided by gas. Some "cracker" (probably a 15-year-old living in Europe) comes up with the electric powered light-bulb.
Suddenly the gas company and the gas-powered lamp multi-national corporations start breaking into people's homes without warrants to catch light-pirates. They force through a Congressional bill that would require TV and AC manufacturers to design their devices to handle specially modulated power signals. Wall outlets and power-distribution switches are designed to detect non-conforming devices, and to send electrical discharges that destroy non-licensed technology, presumable the pirate "light bulbs".
No provision is made for the GLAA (Gas-powered Lamp Association of America) to pay customers for TVs or ACs damaged accidentally.
The law is amended to prevent the GLAA from actually damaging equipment. Instead, they monitor your electricity usage, look f
Look, it's probably already been covered, but here goes...
You don't aim the solar sail directly at the sun. You aim it so that the sun's light is reflected back into your orbital path, and you are accelerated on your orbital path. Increased orbital speed means increased orbital energy, which will push you into a higher orbit.
The highly elliptical orbit is avoided as long as the thrust is constant. As your sail "peaks out" and would want to start falling back in (on its ellipse), you continue to add energy, which means that you continue to spiral out away from the sun.
Now, you can't actually aim your thrust perpendicular to the line from your sail to the sun. You have to aim it sort of diagonally, with a component of thrust pushing you away from the sun and a component accelerating your orbital velocity. But this is a good thing, since it's actually more efficient. You could use 100% of your thrust to increase your orbital velocity. Or, using a little trig, you could use 50% of your thrust to increase your orbital velocity, and 86.6% of your thrust to push away from the sun.
The return trip is fairly similar. You aim the sun's reflected light forward into your orbital path, which robs your sail of energy, and you start to fall/spiral inward. Of course, by the time you're out at Pluto's orbit, even if you could completely stop your orbital velocity, and just fall straight into the sun (with your sail perpendicular to the sun to prevent outward acceleration), it would take a long, long time to free-fall back to earth's orbit. So the return trip is virtually guaranteed to take longer than the outbound trip. But that's where a solar-powered ion-engine would come in handy. Use the solar sail to go out, conserving propellant and saving mass, then use the solar sail to induce a free-fall or near free-fall and use the ion-engine to get back in a reasonable timeframe.
<sarcasm>Yeah, he probably doesn't know shit</sarcasm>
The proof is in the pudding. This is basic physics that even an undergraduate who's on the ball should be able to figure out. If he really is such an accomplished physicist, then he's also an idiot. Let's go through a few examples:
With a few exceptions, reflection is the absorption and re-emission of photons (TIR being one. Also, there are fancy materials I read about on slashdot that use microscopic bubbles that preclude light of certain wavelengths, allowing perfect reflection of certain wavelengths). Gold argues that a blackbody that absorbs a photon receives a push of momentum.
So, what, re-emitting that photon causes an opposite momentum kick that cancels the first momentum kick? A far-fetched claim, to be sure, but the only one that preserves any semblance of a mathematical foundation. Or does it... It means that if you played backwards a movie of the absorption/re-emission, you would see the photon being absorbed, and the solar sail accelerating toward the sun, then the photon being re-emitted, and the solar sail being accelerated away from the sun. Which is of course the exact opposite of what happens when the movie is played forwards, and hence a violation of the principle that at the quantum level, events have no preferred direction in time. Well, I suppose quantum mechanics could be wrong...
Next, let's address his argument about equilibrium. Quoth:
Would it be better to place a black sheet there instead of a mirror-faced one? Unlike the mirror, this could absorb energy and the momentum associated with that. But it would do this only from the moment of its exposure until it reached thermal equilibrium with the available radiation. Then energy absorption would cease, and with that the delivery of momentum to the sheet would also cease. For any lightweight sheet, this time would be only seconds.
Hmm, as I recall, the solar sail was to be extremely thin, right? So the blackbody radiation that it would emit would be in both directions, imparting no net acceleration or deceleration. Yet energy would continue to flow from the direction of the sun. Even if we accepted Gold's bogus claim that only absorbed (non-reflected) light imparts momentum, clearly there is still energy pouring in from only one direction, even at "thermal equilibrium". Another way to look at it is that the side that is exposed to space is not in thermal equilibrium, and continues to emit blackbody radiation into space. Sorry Gold, no twinkie.
As to his point that the "temperature" of the reflected light doesn't drop, that's crap. If he's going to assign a temperature to the incoming light, then he can't compare the "temperature" of the refelcted light in an accelerating frame.
Quoth:
We can determine the incoming temperature of the radiation by measuring the temperature an absorbing (black) body would reach when exposed to the radiation being sent to the mirror, and the temperature a black body would reach exposed to the outgoing radiation from the mirror, both measurements carried out in common motion with the mirror.
These are two completely different reference frames. When a single photon is reflected off the solar sail, the solar sail is ever-so-slightly accelerated. That means the reference frame he chose for the reflected light is not the same as the reference frame for the incoming light. The photon is ever-so-slightly red-shifted in the frame of reference that the solar sail was in before the photon struck it; hence, there actually is a drop in its "temperature".
This will change eventually, or at least it should. When people hire contractors to come in and fix their house, they don't always go for the lowest bidder who will finish faster.
If you want your walls painted, do you hire the guy who costs $500 and takes two days, or the guy who costs $300 and takes one day.
The first guy guarantees that he will use a coat of primer, two coats of paint, and that he will fix any defects, though there probably will be very few if any.
The second guy guarantees that there will be paint on the wall.
Yeah, there's cheap bastards out there that will go with the second guy, but most people would go for the first one.
But in this society, people don't care about the quality of technology. They don't want two coats of paint; they don't want the right color and right finish; they don't even care if there's a coat of primer. They just want paint on the wall. That's one of the many, many reasons that the dot-coms failed. And at some point, people are going to have to start caring. I hope, anyway.
In weblogs, letters, personal emails, etc., it is quite common to ignore the conventions of punctuation, captialization, and even spelling. And yes, sometimes people make mistakes. Sorry, but no points are awarded for your critique!
However, when one uses "loose" in place of "lose", it is usually quite obvious that the person actually believes this to be the correct spelling. So the poster above you still had a valid point!
There is a difference between the occasional misspelling or grammar mistake, and the constant misspelling of lose/loose.
That is, it's one thing if I accidentally misspelled "lose" as "loose" in one instance, if I were to spell it correctly 95% of the time. It's quite another thing to be a moron who thinks that when he has lost something, he should try harder not to loose something else.
For that matter, most engineers think that "setup" is a verb. The fact that you can set something up implies the verb's separability, and hence the requirement for a space between "set" and "up". This would be another example where, regardless of the conventions that are or are not being followed, you can still tell if someone clearly does not know how something should be written.
I read a story in an Asimov magazine about 8-10 years ago that addressed the energy issue. While somewhat farfetched at the time, I've seen other serious proposals in recent years.
It basically consists of a huge tower or two built in the Gulf of Mexico (perhaps in Texas and Mississippi, or wherever). The towers suck in hot moist air at the bottom, and the air rises. As it rises, the air cools, and moisture condenses, releasing heat/engergy. The condensed warm water is extracted, and cold dry air exits the top of the towers, at about 25,000-30,000 feet. The guy ran some basic figures in his article, and found that a tower could change the air over several hundred square miles from 90 degrees at 90% humidity to 85 degrees at 85% humidity during the late summer months. This would reduce the energy available in front of incoming hurricanes, weakening them just before landfall. And because of the pressure and humidity gradients that would be created, it would actually help, not hinder energy dissipation from the warm Gulf waters.
Of course, the costs of the project would be stupendous, and even factoring in the savings in hurricane damages, it would take decades to pay for itself.
Walmart offered CDs below cost? I can't remember when the last time was that I bought new hit CDs for under a buck at WalMart. Let me think... No, I think I always pay more than 10 or 12 bucks for the new stuff, and at least eight for the old stuff.... No, I can't think of a time in the last couple years I was able to buy something on the top 100 list for under a buck.
Honestly, below cost? You fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. When they say below cost, they mean below the manufacturing cost (reasonable), shipping cost (reasonable), the 10 cent cut the artist gets (actually lower than it should be), the $1.50 they spend getting marketting clients drunk and laid so they can get their business, the $1.00 that goes to the top executives pocketbook, the $2.00 that goes to the agent, the $3.00 in promotional/advertising fees that they expense, etc. etc. You put enough crooked executives and accountants in a smoke-filled room, and they'll find a way to justify the "cost" of a CD as $5-$10, if not more.
So when they said that WalMart and other discount chains offer CDs "below cost", what they meant to say was that they offer them below Cartel prices.
Put another way, think about sodas. There are soft drink brands out there that sell for 5-6 cents a can in bulk, and 20 cents for individual sale. And they stay in business. Yet if Coca-cola or Pepsi were to quote their "costs" for a can of soda, you can bet it's north of 10 cents a can. Where's that extra 6-8 cents worth of "cost"? It ain't the cost of the soda or the packaging, that's for sure.
Whether it's soda or music, that extra "cost" is name-brand markup, advertising, not to mention overpaid executives. So what if their market's being eroded away. I don't consider name brand recognition/loyalty a "cost", so screw them!
No, no, no, no, no! We *can* control it. We *can* build fault tolerant systems. We *can* take our time to ensure that our application will only respond to valid input/requests/etc...
What happened to the idea of a program having a well defined set of inputs and only causing it to respond to those inputs? And if something goes wrong, where are people getting off trying to blame it on the user be it a person or another program using that well defined interface? Argh.
Actually, I work in support for a software company, and we had a customer report a problem with our software. We eventually tracked it down to a hard disk problem that was returning bad data. The customer actually had the nerve to say that it was our problem, and that if we couldn't handle the bad data, then we were poor programmers.
Now tell me, if the hard drive is going bad and intermittently returns bad data, including the the executable code itself, how are you supposed to deal with that?!? Do you write the code in multiply redundant code blocks, and tweak the machine code so that if the starting offset is set to a random location, including in the middle of a valid instruction, that your code can still recover?
Building code that can respond to all valid inputs with valid outputs, AND can respond to any and all invalid inputs with appropriate errors and or nothing (i.e. ignore the bad input), is one thing. Building a piece of software that can run, even in the presense of faulty hardware, is quite another.
I mean, what the hell do customers want?!? Is my company's software supposed to patch any and all seciruty holes in the OS as well? Fix their broken hardware, divine the corrupted data coming in from peripherals and disk drives? How about foretell the stock market for the next decade, and give them the phone numbers of hot chicks that will do them for free?
Plumbers aren't liable if someone comes around after they have installed central heating and heats up the joints (or drills a hole, etc) to create a leak, so why should software engineers or companies be liable when someone tries to break the code?
I beg to differ. A more fair analogy is if you hired a security firm to install a security system, and then you later found out that the cameras couldn't see criminals wearing green. Suddenly, once this is figured out, people in kermit the frog costumes start breaking in and stealing your stuff, and the cameras never saw a thing.
Far-fetched and silly example, yes. But it underscores the difference between your analogy and the real situation. If IIS or Internet Explorer has a hole that allows a remote root attack on your system, comparing it to a plumber's job is a very bad analogy.
Now, if you compared it to a plumber that decided to run all the pipes along the outside of the building to save money, instead of running them underground and in the walls, and then a "criminal" came along, tapped into the outside line, and fed poison into your drinking supply, then that plumber should be liable. As long as "reasonable" measures were taken to prevent that, then there's no liability (i.e. internal plumbing, and a criminal got hired as a janitor, and got access to the plumbing in the basement, then tapped into the system, then that's not the plumber's problem...)
I think it's a very straightforward thing to solve. The teacher doesn't need to be an expert on calculators, they just need to know what they are trying to teach. In pre-algebra and earlier classes, the bulk of what you're trying to teach is numerical calculation, so for the most part, you don't allow calculators. When a test comes along that is based on a concept more than anything else (like, can they solve word problems), then you allow a simple calculator.
In the more advanced classes, like algebra and up, you can usually allow at least a basic scientific calculator on all your tests, except for those few rare tests when you expect a student to know and apply the formula for something basic like exponents (3^5 isn't too difficult to expect an algebra student to do, but is quite trivial on a calculator).
As you get up into the realm of calculus, then at first a scientific calculator with no built-in calculus tools (diff. and integrals, numeric or symbolic) will suffice. Over time you can phase in graphing calculators/PDAs. You first test them on the basics with the sci calculator, so that they have to apply the principle. Once they've demonstrated they can apply the principle, then a subsequent test on the same subject matter, with a few additions and being more advanced, could allow a graphing calculator. When the next basic concept is taught, it's back to the scientific calculator.
It's quite simple. I realize that this cookie cutter approach doesn't fit everything. But having grown up in the dawn of graphing calculators, I came to depend more on my ability to be able to solve things on my own, to apply what I've learned. When I know it like the back of my hand, then I don't feel guilty using the calculator, because it's become a tool.
I guess this could get into a philosophical debate over whether we want our kids (or even our college students) just using tools that they never bothered to study or understand. I personally feel that a student shouldn't be allowed to use a tool (in math or sciense at least) unless they have studied its origins and understand WHY it works, not just that it works. And most of the time, understanding why it works is hands-on, meaning they have to do it themselves, not let a calculator solve it for them. Understanding why a tool works also helps when a problem comes along that doesn't quite fit the tool. If you understand the tools foundation, you can modify it to fit the problem, and move on. If you don't understand the tool, then you start looking for another tool...
You know, I had to read that twice to see the double/triple meanings of the metaphors you used. Very interesting.
Are these your own thoughts, or are you part of or subscribe to an organization that has more information? Do you have a website that I can visit?
I'm not trying to be a troll or anything. I just am torn between defending capitalism and the USA and other developed countries, and the need for humanity which sometimes seems to fly right in the face of the ideals this country functions on today.
So let me see if I have this straight. The B2C market would convert to pay-per-play(live), meaning the performers would get paid for actual work/performance, whereas the B2B market would continue with the make-money-sitting-on-my-ass method.
I'd say that's fair. The B2C market is roughly a few-to-many market, so pay-per-play is viable, whereas the B2B market (in this case, composers to performers) is a few-to-few market, and composing takes a hell of a lot longer than performing, so those two factors combined justify keeping the make-money-sitting-on-my-ass system for composers.
Any one else's take on this?
Actually, one way to help prevent this and educate the public is to find the CDs that "demonstrate" the lower quality of "Redbook" CDs, and do a manual resampling of the data to from the "super" layer to CD quality. If you can produce a resampling at CD quality that is significantly better than the version shipped on the Redbook layer, and if it's hardly distinguishable from the "super" layer, then you've got ammo to go public with your conspiracy theory. The media would love something like that.
Of course, this is assuming that the "super" layer can be ripped in full digital quality, i.e. that there is no DRM or weak DRM.
Another thing: Based on my understanding of the capabilities of the human ear, any improvement in quality over "CD quality" couldn't be discerned anyways, so what is the advantage of this proposed "improved" format?
Actually, it depends on the type of sounds. High frequency sounds (above 5-10 kHz), common for certain types of instruments or sounds effects, get distorted and sound somewhat flat, especially as they approach the limit of human hearing (16-20 kHz, depending on the person).
Yeah, you're not going to get more incredible bass with high sampling rates. And yeah, going from 16-bit to 24-bit is only going to matter for very quiet sounds on very high-fidelity/low noise equipment. But there are the rare few people who spend hundreds of dollars on the tweeters, not the subwoofers, and who demand the highest quiality "treble". CDs don't deliver it.
3. Can't get them to stop billing you.. call your credit card company and have them stop accepting the charges..
Oh, if only it were that easy. Allow me to relate a horrow story of a friend of mine that he had with MSN. After a few months of service, he decided to cancel and move on to someone else's service.
He went to their webpage, which actually had a cancellation procedure (whatever happened to those days? I smell a conspiracy!). However, after he entered his info and tried to cancel the service (by clicking the button on the webpage), the browser just hung, until the page timed out. He tried several times, but he could never get a cancellation confirmation page to load.
So, he called customer service and tried to cancel through them. They were happy to take his information, waste his time, and then inform him that they were experiencing computer problems, and they could not cancel his service at that time.
So, he called a few days later, and same story. He just kind of let it go, because it was just $20 a month, no big deal, right? So he calls customer service a couple months later, and their computers have since been up and running, but are now broken again. Yeah, a likely story...
So my friend calls Discover, and tells him that he wants to stop accepting charges from MSN. Discover informs him that these charges are recurring and must be cancelled with MSN, Discover cannot decline them.
In the end, my friend was forced to pay off his Discover card and then cancel it. Welcome to Hell, my friends, weclome to Hell...
So you're saying that to qualify as having a story, it has to be non-linear? In other words, it has to be a full simulation where you can do anything you want?
That's like saying the only books that have a story are "choose your own adventure" books.
Granted, the plot is linear, but there is a plot. There's conversations, there's deception, betrayal, there are clues to pick up (although you don't need the clues if your clever or trigger happy enough), there's a whole atmosphere created (i.e. art, another thing protected under the first amendment).
I'll admit, that given the advances in processor speed and AI engines (well, okay, really big scripts usually, that are non-linear enough to not look like scripts), a much more interactive game would be possible today compared to four years ago. But don't let technology get in the way.
If you want to get picky, then let's go back to old Sierra and LucasArts games. My personal favorite? Monkey Island (the first one, but I guess they all would work). That game is extremely non-linear in the short-term scale, though granted the overall plot of the game is fairly linear. But the conversations, the jokes, the romance, the jokes, the characters, the artwork, the jokes, the music, the rubber tree, the jokes... That's clearly free speech, even this judge should be able to see that, even if he does have his head up his... well, I'll refrain from exercising my right to free speech...
There are protected forms of free speech that add far less to the common good, far less to the creativity and knowledge of mankind, that are far more obscene and repulsive, disaffecting the hearts of men and women; compared to games like Monkey Island that postively shaped thousands of young lives in the 80's, adding to creativity, creating a constuctive skillset of problem solving and creating friendships, etc. Don't let a lack of non-linearity justify the claim that a game does not contain a story.
Escpecially games like Half-Life where you're not just going around and shooting things and blowing them up. There's actually a plot. There are clues to follow, people to rescue, a mystery to solve. There are cinematic sequences built straight into the game, using the game engine. It actually makes the game much more interesting, as you immerse yourself into a virtual interactive movie, moving from gameplay straight into cinematic sequences, without cuts in the action, so it all flows together like one glorious whole (Rimmer, you really are one glorious hole!). There's deception, betrayal, etc.
And what about Alice. Yeah, there's comical violence. But it's an artistic expression of a classic novel (and several movies and cartoon adaptations). And there's even a plot to it. Plot, and artistic adapation. Free speech? How much plainer does it get?
I bet the judge played games like Quake Arena, Redneck Rampage, Carmageddon, and Julie's Porn Shack (okay, I made that last one up). I mean, yeah, pick a game that has little or no plot, just gratuitous violence and/or sex, and you might get a bad impression. But you can't judge the whole of video games on a few bad (but fun) apples! And once you admit that at least a good percentage of video games are easy, if not obvious and essential, to classify as protected speech, then what separates them from the other games? A judge's personal opinion? Whoo-hoo, another victory for freedom!!